Matt Galloway has been digging into the book The Influentials: One American in Ten Tells the Other Nine How to Vote, Where to Eat, and What to Buy by Jon Berry and Ed Keller as of late, and calls out bloggers as the poster children of the influentials. Fair enough, certainly blogs are skewed to the early adopter set, but not all bloggers are influential, and certainly not all those who are influential blog. However, online citizens generally are more vocal, active, informed and powerful members of their social circles.

[via http://www.ipdi.org/UploadedFiles/political%20influentials.pdf]

That being said, and illustrated, I don't know that I agree with his statement that the influentials are not reachable through highly niche targeted onlne ads, and I don't think that putting AdSense by Google the Ad Pumper and other category-level interest RSS or blog ads in the same lump assumption really does the medium justice.

It's true that (good) bloggers can equal Influentials. And that's precisely the reason that advertising to targeted, online niche audiences makes sense. Although, you don't need to put bloggers in the mix to make it effective. Let's say we remove the bloggers from this entirely and focus on a more mainstream publisher, say, the Washington Post. Let's not forget, the study pointed out the fact that "traditional advertising" was not as effective at reaching influentials.

I know I'm biased, but I'd hardly call the 'long form ad' that seems to be working in RSS traditional advertising. More to the point, I don't think we can waive the white flag and say that these advertising tools are nonsense, when, in fact, we have major media outlets stating that they make a lot of sense.

At the end of the movie, it looks like this. Influentials buy things, just like the rest of us buy things. They find out about things sooner because they run in different circles than the rest of us. As smart marketers, we need to be in those circles. Right now, RSS is one of the channels into that circle, and we need to be there to reach the influentials who are there now too.

(Incidentally, there's no shortage of buzz about the Washington Post's decision to roll out RSS advertising!)

Dana,

Thanks for the mention. Of course you are right - if executed properly, advertising works with everyone (in some form and to varying degrees of success). And it's, a little over the top to summarily dismiss RSS Ad Sense and the like as nonesense.

I do think RSS requires a new perspective for marketers that will not be entirely comfortable for them. RSS allows the viewer to pick around the advertising. Advertising becomes easier to ignore, i.e. less effective - doubly so for Influentials. If a feed becomes to laden with Ad, it will be dropped by the reader altogether. Furthermore, the genie is out of the bottle with tracking (like the recent 'cookies are your friend and need to be in RSS so we can track you' discussions). More and more readers are reading in aggregation software, you can include teasters as content payload and a link to a (monitored) website - but again this will reduce readership as people want all the content in the feed.

What is effective is what Microsoft is doing with Robert Scoble - paying people to participate in the conversation by contibuting value. According to Scoble, this effect has to be anti-corporate to be credible and effective. This is difficult thinking for traditional marketers. It will feel somewhat like not advertising I expect.

Yet despite all this, all people seem to want to talk about is how hugh the blogosphere is and how can we cram as much advertising in it as possible. As I've said on my blog, I think we're collectively missing the point (or at least an opportunity) and I want to start taht conversation - so sometimes I get a little over zealous.

So thanks for engaging in this converstaion,

Matt